


Reach

by noverture



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, M/M, Nonbinary Lavellan (Dragon Age), Other, all Lavellans are welcome because Solas would love you either way, angst because it's solas, gender-neutral lavellan, heartache because this is solavellan hell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:08:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28478958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noverture/pseuds/noverture
Summary: Solas yearns, and yearns, and yearns.Lavellan is all he sees behind closed eyes and Solas twists himself and his thoughts into such disproportion that his dreams always seem to just echo anything and everything about Lavellan.But Lavellan maintains their professional distance which is for the best.And Solas?He never reaches.“Do you know,” says Lavellan, words mildly blurring from intoxication, “the feeling of… reaching? You’re so close to something, a revelation, epiphany, salvation? A bar just always out of your reach.” They mispronounce quite a few of the words. Solas doesn’t comment on it.“I may know a little of it.”“It sucks.”Solas allows himself a small, self-deprecating chuckle. “Does it not?”
Relationships: Female Lavellan/Solas, Fen'Harel | Solas/Female Lavellan, Fen'Harel | Solas/Male Lavellan, Lavellan/Solas (Dragon Age), Male Lavellan/Solas (Dragon Age)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 36





	Reach

“Do you ever dream of something that you want so much, something brushing against your fingers, but you never get it?” asks Lavellan. They dip their hand in the stream and ribbons of red from their cuts burst in the water, slipping between their fingers. It almost demonstrates their point.

Solas clenches his jaw, a current of irritation ticking beneath his skin. The question has hit closer than Lavellan realises.

“Everyone dreams of it,” is Solas’ careful response.

“I wasn’t asking everyone.”

“I had assumed it was a rhetorical question.”

Lavellan stands and wipes their hand against their coat. “I dream of drowning,” they admit. “And I’d swim up, and I’d see rays of light.” They stare at their marked hand. Close it. “But nothing. I can almost taste the air, but I never break the surface.”

Solas’ chest clenches against his own volition. “Is it symbolic?”

“Aren’t all dreams?”

“I think I would appreciate more symbolic dreams,” he murmurs. “Lately.” But Lavellan doesn’t hear.

Lavellan looks up at the sky. A breeze coasts through Crestwood’s fields and disturbs a few strands of Lavellan’s hair. Solas stares at their profile. He’s long memorised the lines of it, having impressed those lines in charcoal upon parchment.

“Sometimes I see a face,” Lavellan continues. “Beyond the surface, in the middle of all that distorted light.”

“A helper?”

“Possibly. Or someone who’ll push me down further.”

“Surely not.”

“Plenty of people want to push me down. Want me to swallow water and sink.”

“Is this one such person?”

“Leaving me to drown is just as bad as wanting me to sink, isn’t it?”

The crime of inaction. Something steels in Solas’ heart.

“Yes,” he says. “I suppose it is.”

* * *

Lavellan stares at the finished mural detailing their siege on Adamant. Solas swallows back any disapproving remarks he has to make about Lavellan’s choice to accept the Grey Wardens. A dismal air has been hanging about Lavellan. He suspects now isn’t the time.

Solas waits by the table. The candle burns low, threatening to flicker out at any moment.

“Solas?” Lavellan finally asks.

“Yes?” he returns. Can they hear the eager pluck beneath his tone? Is he being far too transparent?

“Are you reaching, too?”

He stops, stares at their back.

“I beg your pardon?” he asks, voice dry.

“Your art feels like it’s calling. Is something responding?”

Lavellan turns, faces him. In the dim light, orange candlelight flickers in their eyes, turns them a molten shade. Those eyes which makes him feel as if he is comprised of glass and any moment now, Lavellan will see the inner workings of him, grasp the tangle of his thoughts and remorse and guilt and empty promises and wring truth out of it.

Solas looks away, pretends to be interested at a blank panel of wall. “Art always calls. It calls for an audience, a consumer, searching for that final piece to transform it, make it whole.”

“Is something responding?” asks Lavellan again.

He smiles. “You do.”

They are struck silent. Solas swallows his smile. _What was that? Why would you say such a thing?_

“A lot of people are responding, you know?” says Lavellan softly. “Not just me.”

“I did not create it to be responded to.”

“Of course you did.” They lay a careful hand on the wall, above the Warden crest. Such a gentle hand. Yet it executes. If Lavellan places their hand upon Solas, will he deteriorate just from the touch of it? “We all call out.”

He calls for home.

Home never responds. Why will it? He has destroyed it.

“You cannot respond if you are gone,” leaves him without his meaning to.

Lavellan stares at him again. _Do you see me?_

“I dreamt of drowning again,” is what Lavellan says. “The water was green this time. I saw the face again.”

“Did the figure lend a hand?”

Lavellan shakes their head. Quiet stretches between them.

“Not that I reached for them,” Lavellan eventually murmurs. They stare at Solas, mildly hopeful. “Will you… dream with me? Tonight?”

Solas hesitates. The last time they’ve dreamt together, Solas revealed more than he should have, speaking of his tentative hope regarding the Inquisition and Lavellan. Lavellan’s presence always tempts him to reveal too much of himself.

And it is best if Lavellan’s influence in the world of dreams remain unreal.

“I apologise,” says Solas, “but I must attend to a few matters.”

Lavellan only smiles. “What do you dream about?”

Solas quells the agitation in his veins. “I drown in a different manner.”

“Do you ever reach?”

“No. Never.”

* * *

There are echoes of Lavellan everywhere in his dreams.

Solas will walk through shifting paths, all bare stone and monochromatic skies, before he sees a splash of colour. A flower blooming from a crack in the stone.

Lavellan’s favourite flower.

Solas will always pluck it and hold it in his hands and walk. And walk. And walk.

By the end of the path, the flower has withered.

Sometimes there are no visions. Sometimes his dreams are only sensations. Warmth. The brush of hair against his cheek. Skin beneath his palms. A voice in his ear, low murmuring, never anything concrete, but he already knows who the voice belongs to.

Today, Lavellan is waiting for him in a field. The grass shifts hues as the wind whistles past the blades.

Lavellan stares up at the sky. Lavellan always stares up at the sky.

“Desire,” Solas greets.

“It’s soft,” says Desire.

They sit together and watch the monochromatic sky while the sea of colours around them brushes against their thighs.

* * *

“My favourite sound was the singing symphony of striking magic,” says Cole. “Now it’s your laugh. It’s better.”

Solas watches Lavellan laughing at the story Blackwall is narrating, the campfire gilding the edges of Lavellan’s face.

He later dreams of Lavellan dancing and laughing, ribbons of fire trailing behind them as though they are a pyre. Solas just isn’t certain what the pyre is burning.

When Lavellan comes close to him and cups his face, the searing heat curls in his chest.

Ah.

* * *

“Do you know,” says Lavellan, words mildly blurring from intoxication, “the feeling of… reaching? You’re so close to something, a revelation, epiphany, salvation? A bar just always out of your reach.” They mispronounce quite a few of the words. Solas doesn’t comment on it.

“I may know a little of it.”

“It sucks.”

Solas allows himself a small, self-deprecating chuckle. “Does it not?”

Lavellan sways. Solas catches them, and they ascend the ridiculous steps to the Inquisitor’s chambers together.

“Is this about the dream again?” Solas asks.

“Maybe,” they mutter. “Just in general.”

He helps them reach their bed, and immediately steps back. Lavellan tips to the side and just lays prone over the sheets, arms spread in front of them, hands slightly hanging off the edge. They stare ahead at nothing. The blank look strikes Solas’ heart and grips it. He stops himself from reaching out to offer comfort and instead clasps his hands behind his back, squeezes his own wrist, nails digging into skin.

“No face this time,” Lavellan says.

“Did you reach?”

“What’s the point?”

“The fight itself. Striving to never succumb.”

Lavellan closes their eyes. Their voice comes out subdued. “My muscles are cramping. Even then?”

“Especially then,” he murmurs. “But you mustn’t let that stop you.”

No answer. Lavellan has fallen asleep.

Solas sighs and frees the grip he has on his wrist, takes a wary step forward. Lavellan doesn’t stir. Solas gathers their legs and swings them up properly onto the bed, pulling the sheets from beneath to pull it over them. Lavellan is warm.

He steps back again. Two large paces.

Continue fighting even when the muscles are cramping.

The heart is a muscle is it not? Maybe it is cramping.

* * *

He visits Lavellan’s dream by accident.

Solas stands on a lonely, broken pier, the only pier amidst the sea. The drowning dream.

He looks at the water and already knows what to expect.

A shape writhes beneath it.

Solas crouches at the end of the pier and leans over the edge, frowns into the water, watches for the shape.

The shape is but a shadow in the deep blue waters. It shifts beneath the surface but Solas can never get a clear enough view. He sets his jaw and hold his hand out. Ready to breach the surface—

Arlathan’s crumbling spires reflect in the deep blue. Screams fill his ears. Smoke clogs his throat.

Solas jerks his hand back and he loses his balance. He falls back on the pier, pulse hammering and serving as the rhythm to the parade of his regrets. His sins press behind his eyes. Solas curls in on himself and hugs himself until his ribs complain under the strain and bones press against bone.

And even then, he makes himself ever smaller.

The sea laps at the rotting masts of the pier.

* * *

“I tried to reach.”

Solas’ head snaps up from his book. Lavellan stares at his murals again, this time running their fingers over the blue of Empress Celene’s dress.

“Tried?”

They shrug. “Thought of it, at least.”

“Why didn't you?”

“I think,” says Lavellan, “that I’m supposed to drown.”

He stares at them in the ensuing silence. He always stares.

“Inquisitor—”

“Or I’m supposed to stay in the water. It’s where I’m supposed to be.”

“It is causing you distress.”

“Maybe I’ll just accept the water. Stop trying to swim upwards. Just float.”

Solas says nothing, only clenches his hands over his thighs.

Lavellan smiles wanly at him. “I have to leave since I have a judgement soon. Florianne. Should be fun.”

And all he can say is, “Dareth shiral.”

Lavellan leaves him alone in the rotunda.

He tastes saltwater on his lips.

* * *

The Temple of Mythal presses against him in all the wrong places, a puzzle piece forced into the wrong slot.

Home, and yet a reminder of his failures.

The last of his brethren dies around him, unerring towards their one, last purpose: defend. Defend with all they have.

He cannot let their sacrifices be in vain.

And Lavellan has chosen to accept the last of his people’s legacy.

He almost grips their wrist, holds them back, his heart in his throat, because they do not understand the weight of this. The weight of this Well.

But all he manages is a weak, pleading, “Inquisitor.”

Lavellan reassures him with a soft pat on the shoulder. His shoulder burns.

“It’s where I’m supposed to be.”

“Not this water,” he says, strained.

“I’ll try to float,” they joke but their eyes aren’t laughing.

Lavellan doesn’t float.

Lavellan just screams.

* * *

“I sank.”

Lavellan is on the couch today, knees drawn up, shadows beneath their eyes. Solas washes his hands free of the crushed pigments from the most recent mural. He considers it a small miracle that he’s managed to finish the panel since he’s been plagued with nausea while he painted.

Because all he’s been able to see are the dead and the dying while Lavellan’s screams echo in his head.

“Was there a bottom?” Solas asks.

“Infinite,” Lavellan says. The Well has taken its toll. They look like a ghost. Solas doesn’t draw Lavellan anymore because it seems disrespectful to depict them as anything but their current state, as if he is taking away their fight, but he also doesn’t have the stomach to immortalise their suffering upon paper.

“Was it any better than fighting?” he asks.

They bury their head in their knees. “It doesn’t matter. Hell either way. There’s no winning there, not for me.”

The ravens in the rookery fill the cold interim.

* * *

He dreams of Lavellan falling as Arlathan crumbles around them.

Lavellan doesn’t reach.

Neither does he.

* * *

Something cold fills him as he holds the shattered fragments of the orb in his hands.

Lavellan takes a faltering step towards him. They look as if they want to reach out.

"I feel like I'm about to lose you," Lavellan says, voice fringed with pain.

“You mean a lot to me,” Solas whispers.

Something flickers in Lavellan’s expression. They clutch at the wound across their torso, takes another step forward, but something gives.

Lavellan’s eyes roll to the back of their head and they collapse.

Solas releases a shuddering breath and flicks his wrist, his magic stopping Lavellan from hitting the ground. He sets them down gently and stands.

He cradles the broken orb and walks away.

* * *

The pier collapses into the sea, but Solas is long gone.


End file.
